It’s beginning to look a lot like…oh wait, it’s only October. We still have a few more months before Christmas. But when I look outside, it does, kinda look like Christmas…

So far our drifts are about 3-4 feet tall, but we have probably only gotten about 18 in. of snow in the last 24 hours. The local weather folks say that it should stop snowing late tonight. 

 

At Sherri’s request…here is the recipe for my momma’s homemade whole wheat pizza crust that I referenced in my last post! Sometimes I become intimidated by yeast, but trust me, this is delicious and very easy to make.

 This will  make enough dough for 2 large pizza’s.

2 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast

2 tsp. brown sugar

1 1/2 c. warm water (80-110 degrees F)

1 tsp. salt

2 Tbl. olive oil

1 1/4 c. all-purpose whole wheat flour

1 1/4 c. all-purpose flour

Italian Seasoning

Yellow Cornmeal

Olive Oil

Parmesan Cheese

 

1. In a large bowl, dissolve brown sugar and yeast in warm water. Let set for 10 minutes.

 

2. Stir salt and olive oil into yeast solution. Mix in 2 1/2 cups of flour (half of this amount should be whole wheat, and half should be white) until well blended. Add in more flour until dough is no longer sticky and easy to work with. (You may not need all 3 1/2 cups or you may need much more than that amount–it depends of the weather!)

 

3. Knead dough with hands for about 10 minutes, or until dough is smooth and soft. Add more flour to dough as necessary. 

 

4. Place dough ball in a well oiled bowl and cover with a cloth. Set the bowl in a warm location to let the dough rise until double in size (about 1 hour).

5. After 1 hour, punch down dough and divide into two tight balls. Allow to rest for one minute. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

 

6. Roll dough out onto a floured surface. Sprinkle pizza crust with Italian seasoning. If using a pizza stone, lightly dust top of stone with flour and cornmeal. Place dough on stone and brush outer edge (where the crust will be) with olive oil and sprinkle with parmesan cheese. Poke inner (non-crust) area with a fork to create air holes. Bake crust on lowest rack in oven for approximately 5-10 minutes (depending on thickness) just until lightly browned. Remove from oven to add toppings.

 

Yummy!!!

 

You may wonder why not 100% whole wheat…the dough can tend to taste rather grainy, which is also why I think my mom would add a little brown sugar when dissolving the yeast…to help give a little sweetness to the whole wheat. I have done this using only whole wheat only, but I personally prefer doing 1/2 white flour and 1/2 whole wheat flour.

In usual fashion (so as not to disappoint!), I am posting about Linden turning 15 months old, when she will be 16 months old in 6 days.

This month has been so, so much ridiclous fun with our sweet girl! Linden has kept us all laughing with her awesome (and beyond her age, in my non-biased mommie opinion) sense of humor. For example…

We’re driving to Grandma & Grandpa E.’s one morning and she says, “Momma see, Momma see!” so I look in my handy-dandy mommie mirror in my CRV to see her sticking her right hand underneath and through her car-seat belt and waving it, along with her left arm, wildly and laughing at herself like she is the funniest person.ever. And of course, this cracks me up and I start laughing….so she continues to do this a couple more times until we’re both just laughing so.hard.

On another day, we were at dinner with Grandpa E. at Qdoba (Grandma E. was out in California visiting our new, adorable newphew) and Linden is eating bits and pieces of our buritto. She sticks a big piece of tortilla in her mouth, moves it to cover her teeth, and starts smiling and laughing and showing us all the tortilla mouth-piece she had created. Where does she come up with this stuff?

Something else that cracks Linden up is when Toby, Grandma & Grandpa E.’s grumpy cat, hisses at her when she comes near him. To most people, a cat hissing at them indicates the cat wants nothing to do with them and that you should back away. Linden does not feel this way – she knows that Toby secretly loves her and she thinks the hissing is an expression of how elated he is that she is chasing him…right…

At her 15 month well-visit earlier this month she weighed in at 24 pounds, 12 oz. (70th %) and was 33 inches tall (94th%) and her head was in the 45th%. These days she needs 24 month pants so they are long enough, but her 12 month skirts still fit her best around the waist. She will be a lucky girl to have this problem as she gets older.

Some of her latest words are:

* Beep, Beep!

* Vroom-Vroom! (notice a car theme here…)

* Juice

* Mine

* Fee! Fee! (Ryan chases her saying “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum…”

* Book

And one of our the sweetest new things she has started doing this month is giving kisses. *Sigh* It melts my heart every time.

The sweet kisses are certinaly appreciated and serve as a nice reminder that she is a sweet little girl, because sometimes that little onrey toddler attitude likes to creep out and try to taint the sweetness….but we are fighting it

These pictures were taken while Linden helped me make homemade whole-wheat pizza crust last Friday afternoon. She decided she had to taste-test every ingredient that went in to the crust…brown sugar, salt, flour, cornmeal…and surprisingly, she didn’t seem to think anything tasted bad. She was an awesome helper and we had so much fun making the pizza together!

In just 1 week I will be headed to Washington D.C. for a short work conference, and Ryan will fly out to join me 2 days later for a week of vacation! We are so excited to get to have time to get away together in such a cool city. If I think about it, this would be our first week long vacation together since our honeymoon. We are long weekend getaway junkies, but have not taken the time to take off an entire week for fun!

We are flying my mom in from Kansas to stay with Linden for the week, and while we will miss our sweet baby like crazy, I know that she will have a blast with Grandma N, and Ryan and I will certinaly enjoy the get away. In order to help the week go smoothly for both my Mom and Linden, I typed up an exhasutive document that I titled “Linden Schedule, Likes, Quirks and Other Helpful Tips.” I think the thing was almost 5 pages long, single spaced. I (at least) tried to make it witty and entertaining for Mom…when I sent it to her last week she said that it made her laugh, excited, and that it was very imformative. I also took the time to make an authorized and notrizied document that will allow my mom to make medical decisions for Linden, on our behalf, while we are traveling. I think I would reccommend this to any parent traveling out of town while their child stays with a loved one. It has already made both us and my Mom feel secure about the arrangement.

Ryan has been to D.C. at least twice, but he has promised me that he is still just as excited to go and explore as I am. We are staying in Downtown D.C. for 4 nights and staying in Old Town Alexandria, VA for 2 nights.

The rich American history that has taken place in and around D.C. has always been of interest to me, and I have always, always wanted to make a trip to our Nation’s Capitol. I am completly letting Ryan be our cruise director for the trip and have let him know if there are any specific things that I want to do…see the White House, visit the Museum of American History, the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington National Cemetary and the Washington Monument. Oh I am so very excited! Stay tuned…

I became an Aunt last Thursday to this sweet little Christian Isaac! We are so excited to have him in the family and cannot wait to watch him grow up. Christian is the son of Ryan’s sister, Erin, and her hubby, Steve.

We cannot wait to meet you little guy!

You can read all about Christian’s entry into the world here at Erin’s blog, and you can also read Ryan’s thoughts on his little newphew here.

BMW Winning Notification.

This was the subject line of the more than 6,000 e-mails that were sent out from my work e-mail account, via a hacker, to Lord knows who in about 1.5 hours yesterday morning.

You might be wondering how this could possibly have happened. Well, it all started on Tuesday evening when I noticed an e-mail from our system administrator telling me that I had exceeded the storage space for my e-mail account. The message said that I would need to delete messages to free up space, and then click through to a link to re-activate my account.

When I got to work yesterday morning, I realized that I had, in fact, not been getting e-mails and had a bunch sitting in my outbox, which I figured was due to exceeding my account limit.

So I clicked through the link in the e-mail from (what I thought was) our IT System Administrator. I entered in my e-mail address, user ID and password information for the network and clicked enter. The e-mails sitting in my outbox went out the door to their intended location, and my e-mail started to back-update from the time that I had exceeded my limit.

I then headed off to a meeting. During which, my blackberry was vibrating non-stop, notifying me of a new e-mail. Finally, I look at my phone only to see that I had recieved some 500 e-mails in about 30 min!!! They were messages from the System Administrator saying that an e-mail with the subject line BMW Winning Notification was undeliverable. I thought that was really, really, wierd, but I had to stay checked-in to the meeting I was at.

About an hour later I was back in my office and I called our IT Help desk to figure out was going on. At this point, I was up to some 6,000 e-mails telling me that some e-mail that I didn’t send about winning a BMW was undeliverable, apprently to many, many, many people!!

Before our IT desk could help me, he said that I had to provide my anniversary date for security purposes. I automatically assumed he was referring to my hire date, which I never, ever remember correctly. I told him that I thought it was either September 17, 18 or 19.

After I said this he laughed and said, “Gee, sounds like you’re really happy with YOUR marriage! You don’t even know your anniversary!”

I quickly explained that I am very, very happily married and I assumed he was asking for my anniversary/hire date here at work….

Our help desk guy then tried to be nice about the whole crazy mess of a  situation, but told me that I very foolishly gave out my password to a hacker, and that our IT staff will never ask for my password. Ugh! He then, probably rightly so, talked to me like I was an 80 year old woman who didn’t know what a computer was.

Oh brother!

Talk about embrassing, annoying and funny all wrapped up in to one!

The undeliverable messages are still coming in, by the 100s, but it really is  a much slower pace than yesterday and our IT folks assured me that this will all stop soon.

So, if you got an e-mail from me saying you won a BMW, I’m sorry, you really didn’t.

And I kind of defer my absent-minded, less than stellar-sharp behavior on the fact that Linden is getting 2 molars right now and decided to start yesterday at 4:45 a.m…yes, I am blaming my 15 month old.

We had our first dusting of snow in Denver yesterday and are suppose to get 6 in. – 1 foot of snow tonight! Phew – fall has certinaly arrived! The leaves on the trees are looking beautiful and I am enjoying wearing my sweaters and scarfs again.

Here are some pictures we took of Linden last week near our neighborhood.

Ryan is not a big fan of Halloween and costumes. But he humors my desire to dress up Linden and hand out candy to all the cute little kiddos that come to the door.

He even came up with what I think is a really cute idea for Linden this year…Pebbles. I think it would be fun to join Linden and be Wilma – I mean, come on, the woman wears pearls every day – we’re kindred spirits.

Now I’m just going to see if I can get him to dress up as Fred…

I just happened upon the blog of a 20 year-old girl, Katie, who is living and serving in Uganda, mothering 13 orphaned children and caring for hundreds in a near by village. All.by.herself.

As I read through Katie’s life story she tells through her blog I am literally brought to tears. Partly because of the great lavishness for which Ryan and I live our lives and partly because of the deep despair, specifically of the children, of the people of Uganda – and certinaly Africa as a whole.

Katie’s blog is an open and honest account of her daily life being an adoptive mother to 13 and reaching so many others through pratical health and food needs.

I believe the last statistic I heard was that if you make more than $20,000 a year, then worldwide you are considered rich. If I made $20,000 a year, I am confidant I would feel poor.

I know that in my own life God has provided for our family financially far beyond what we need. We do have a few individuals and families that we send support money to, but I know that we are not currently giving to a point that affects the ebb and flow of our life’s activities. Our family can give more. But instead, I usually take more for myself. I am not trying to go on a virtual guilt trip, or give anyone else one. I am just mulling through the reasons of my own apathy and selfishness. I know that I am easily distracted by notions of what most call “The American Dream” or “wanting the best for my child” or “little treats.”

Just a few thoughts for today.

Disturb us, Lord, when We are too well pleased with ourselves, When our dreams have come true Because we have dreamed too little, When we arrived safely Because we sailed too close to the shore. Disturb us, Lord, when With the abundance of things we possess We have lost our thirst For the waters of life; Having fallen in love with life, We have ceased to dream of eternity And in our efforts to build a new earth, We have allowed our vision Of the new Heaven to dim. Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, To venture on wider seas Where storms will show your mastery; Where losing sight of land, We shall find the stars. We ask You to push back The horizons of our hopes; And to push into the future In strength, courage, hope, and love.

attributed – sir francis drake -1577

I don’t think that I have given much time on the blog to my thoughts about working full time as a wife and mommy, so I would like to record some of my current thoughts and a bit of reflection from the past 11 months of working full-time since having Linden.

In about two weeks I will have my one year anniversary of working here, which is almost hard to believe that it has been that long! For me, when an anniversary-ish milestone is approaching I generally feel both like time has flown by and that it also seems like that particular event (being married, getting a year older, living some place) has been in place forever. This is not the case at all with working full-time in Colorado – I feel like I literally just went back to work and that Linden is just a little more than three months old…but clearly I have an almost 15 month old daughter, and I actually do know what is going on at work and some how I have (hopefully some-what successfully) muddled through being a full-time working mom.

Before Linden was born, and long before Ryan was a part of my life, I always imagined myself working full-time after I became a mom. Growing up, I was just never the girl who longed to be a mommy. In sixth grade I aspired to be the first woman president, and while those humorous and lofty dreams fizzled, I still never pictured myself as a stay-at-home wife/mom. In fact, I really didn’t imagine myself being married until I was 30ish – even though I decided not to make a run for the oval office in 2020, I did want to be a doctor, a cardiologist to be exact. 

Flash forward to 2007 – Ryan and I have been married for two years and we start talking about expanding our family (not starting a family as Ryan would always remind me…the two of us were already a family.). I was adamant to Ryan that I had no desire to be a stay-at-home mom. I loved my job, the people I worked with and I had been very successful in my young marketing career. Besides Ryan wasn’t super career oriented and driven like I was – it would probably be a lot more financially viable for him to stay home, long term, if that was ever our concern.

Flash forward again to the hospital, right after Linden was born. Oh my, talk about love at first sight! I remember just starring at our precious baby girl in my arms and I simply couldn’t imagine anyone else being able to take care of her. Enter major emotional break-down and freak-out moment. Luckily for Ryan, my mom was there at the hospital with us and was able to help calm me down from my complete hysteria. In addition to feeling like I couldn’t possibly ever work again and leave Linden under anyone else’s care, I think this freak out moment(s) were also brought on by the fact that… we were moving across the country from Florida to Colorado in 3 weeks to be closer to family and for Ryan’s new job; I still needed to resign from my current beloved job because we had just found out that we were moving and Ryan had only gotten his new job just 2 days before Linden was born; I ended up having an un-planned C-section so I somehow needed to recover enough from this so that I could pack up our entire life in to boxes, mostly by myself, for the movers that were coming just 3 weeks from the day Linden was born; and the obvious fact that there are about 100 billion hormones that are alive and kickin’ after you have a baby…phew! By the grace of God I lived to write about it.

I ended up getting a job in Denver at the exact place I had always, always wanted to work. Even from when I was in my “I will be a doctor” phase. They were even willing to wait for me to start until I was ready. So when Linden was 17 weeks old, hi-ho-hi-ho, it was off to work I went. The first day back was really awful, emotionally. I think it is for all mom’s who continue to work. My particular experience was compounded by the fact that my 1st day back to work was also my 1st day at a new job, in a new city. I remember running away from Linden’s daycare crying and the sweet director woman followed me asking me if I was okay—but I just kept running because, while I appreciated her concern, I really just needed to go.

The first couple of months back working were pretty taxing, physically and emotionally. I breast-fed Linden full-time for 9 months and pumped 2-3 times at work, and then when she was 10 months old she started loosing interest and I was just nursing her twice a day and only pumping once at work. I had a really positive experiencing nursing, but I would not sugar-coat it…it was a huge time commitment – one that I was happy to do, but one that I was also not that sad to see pass.

Aside from wanting to spend time with my sweet girl during the day, one of the most difficult things I have encountered while working full-time has been finding time and managing my time effectively to make sure that…Ryan and I have time together; that the 3 of us have good family time together; cooking dinner or helping Ryan cook dinner; laundry (I really, really hate laundry…I think I will do a post soon about it!); cleaning; pulling weeds in the lawn; personal Bible study time; time for small group and having spiritual fellowship…are there enough time in the days?! All of this actually made me feel guilty about all the time I wasted before Linden was born. I thought I was soooo busy then. Who was I kidding?! And some crazy little OCD bug took over my body after Linden was born, causing me to desire everything at my house to be clean and tidy all.the.time. Seriously, what is wrong with me?

Something else that I have encountered -with both being a mom, in general, and working full-time- is guilt. Man, how Satan likes to take that pesky guilt and distract God’s people. But for me, I have never experienced guilt in the way that I have since I became a mom. I think it is especially easy to feel guilty as a working mom who is a Christ follower. I can only think of 1-2 mom’s in our entire church (around 200 people) who work. My mom never worked until I was almost out of high school. I didn’t have any close friends who had a child yet who were working. I felt a little isolated initially. I knew that I had made the right decision for me, but I had nobody to glean wisdom and advice from concerning time management to get the necessary house hold chores done, or how they make time for alone time with God.

It finally dawned on me, when Linden was 9 months old, that my old BSM director from TCU was a mommy of a toddler, pursuing her PhD. and was a preschool teacher. Emily gave me awesome advice and counsel about all of the questions that had been running through my mind for the almost 6 months I had been back to work….if you’re doing what God has directed you to do, there is no guilt!; do a little laundry every evening when you get home; use the crock pot more; evaluate which church activities you are involved in and maybe you don’t do some of them any more; keep a magic eraser in the shower with you and clean a little after you shower; and sometimes, the house will just be a mess! It was like my prayers had been answered and a weight was lifted, just reading her encouraging advice!

So over time it has gotten a bit easier. It’s like anything else in life, the more you do it, the easier or more smooth the operation becomes. I have stressed out a lot less about the house and managing time in the last 3-4 months, but most importantly I think my experiences working have refined my character in various ways, and caused me to realize that I cannot do anything on my own. God truly provides the vision and vehicle for accomplishing what He has set before us. God has been very good to our family in this season of life transition. Ryan is the most helpful and supportive husband/dad and is always looking for ways to help lighten my load. God has also given us loving people (Grandma E. & Ms. Sharon) to keep Linden while I am at work. My job is extremely flexible and I have had countless opportunities to build relationships with my co-workers and also my next door neighbors when I get home, which is what I love the most. 

So thanks for humoring all of my thoughts on this subject. It is something that I have been intending to share for quite a while and I hope that it can be encouraging to any other working mom’s out there!